Premier Farnell and Social Media

Who are Premier Farnell PLC?

The electronics industry emerged in the twentieth century and has now become a global industry worth billions of dollars. Premier Farnell was the 7th largest distributor in the world with Avnet being the largest in 2010. (EETimes, 2010).

Premier Farnell plc is a leader in the high service, multi-channel provision of essential products, information, software and technology solutions to electronic design engineers, maintenance and repair engineers and purchasing professionals globally. (Premier Farnell, 2014)

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media

The advantages of using social media are:

-        -  Social Media has the power to drive traffic to the company website.

-         -  It helps bring the community together, allowing people from all over the world to come together and express their views.

-         -  It builds loyalty and trust with your customers, as they feel they are not obliged to buy something.

-          = It is a creative way of appealing to your customers, giving them something to talk about

-          = It gives consumers a chance to express their views, meaning that others are more likely to shop with your business from hearing a positive review.

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The disadvantages of using social media are:

-         -  Social Media can be more time consuming than businesses expect, if they don’t receive a higher return in tweets or through clicks , then it is not a success.

-         -  Companies need to employ people who are fully trained in Social Media, if not, use external companies who specialize in social media.

-          - They also need to know which channels of social media to focus on.

-        -   Negative feedback can be obtained by anyone and uncontrollable to the business. True opinions are voiced whatever type of feedback it is.

-          - When social media is used in the wrong way it could really affects a business.

Social Media at Farnell

According to Stuart Jones (Global Social Media Manager), Social Media was introduced at Farnell in May2010.

B2C (2011), claim that eight in every ten marketers (78%) currently using social media in their Marketing strategy, however only one fifth (21%) have received any training in social media.

Element14 (2013), states that element14 Community was launched in 2009. It is the first online community specifically for engineers, from electronic design all the way through maintenance and repair. It allows electronic enthusiasts to connect with professional engineers and experts, get accurate information, answers and tools from a wide range of independent sources and manufacturers.

In January 2013, the community site generated an average of over $23.8K per day through referring visitors to their transactional site.

This graph shows element14’s Daily Community Traffic for 2012.

Source: element14 Community Bimonthly Insights

References

B2C. (2011) ‘B2B Social Media: Highlights From New Benchmarking Research’ [Online] <http://www.business2community.com/b2b-perspective/b2b-social-media-highlights-from-new-benchmarking-research-048465> [Accessed 4th May 2014]

EETimes. (2010) 'Top 25 Global distributors' [Online] <http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4199228/2010-top-25-global-distributors-item-1> [Accessed 4th May 2014]

Element14 (2013) ‘About Us’ [Online] <http://www.element14.com/community/static/about?ICID=about_about_menubar> [Accessed 4th May 2014]

Premier Farnell. (2013a) ‘Our Company: Our Business’ [Online] <http://www.premierfarnell.com/our-company/our-businesses> [Accessed 4th May 2014]